Dan Carpenter: Republican legislators treated Indy as Statehouse pawn

Apr. 26, 2013

First of all, Marion County Democrats and their core constituencies have themselves to blame for this outrage.

Had they mustered a decent voter effort in 2007 and 2011, they would have one of their own in the mayor’s office; and the Republican gambit in the legislature to bring more “efficiency” to this city’s government would have gone the way of high-speed rail.

Mayor Greg Ballard took back the 25th floor for the GOP by capturing a little more than half of a roughly 30 percent turnout, and has leveraged that ho-hum showing into unprecedented influence over the public schools and stunning expansion of his power courtesy of his party’s supermajority in the Indiana General Assembly.

A bill that breezed through the House and Senate in the session’s final two days would eliminate the four at-large City-County Council seats (all now held by Democrats) as of 2015; shift appointments to the Metropolitan Development Commission away from county office-holders (now all Democrats) to the mayor; and force those office-holders to submit their budgets twice a year to the (mayor’s) city controller, who could cut them if he found funds insufficient.

Just responsible city management, Republican lawmakers insist. Micromanagement of local affairs for pure political ends, say the Democrats.

A straight face comes easier to the latter.

As the census, the sweep of county offices and the dominance of the at-large council vote indicate, Marion is a Democratic county despite Ballard’s interruption and the still-close council makeup (a 15-14 Democratic edge now, 15-14 Republican last term). The waves are pounding the walls of a political levee that went un-breached from the late 1960s to 1999, when Bart Peterson became Uni-Gov’s first Democratic mayor and set the stage for the first Democratic controlled council to arrive four years later.

How to shore it up, if you’re the GOP?

Redistricting, of course, which the lame-duck Republican council did just before Democrats got their majority back, setting up a court battle over – heaven forbid – partisan boundaries.

“A tremendous abuse of power,” says columnist-economist-social commentator Morton Marcus. “Your responsibility when you’re in the majority is not to trample on the minority. There’s nothing to suggest there was any reasoning behind any of this. They simply did what they wanted to do.”

Both parties know the wisdom of being careful what you wish for. In 1969, Democrats gave up the prize of city hall, at least for the short term, in exchange for a broader tax base. Republicans gained the distinction of running a large city in defiance of a Democratic national trend, and launched Mayor Richard Lugar’s U.S. Senate career in the bargain.

Now that the long-term trend is manifesting itself, legislative Republicans led by Indy-based Sen. Michael Young want to seize the opportunity raised by the Ballard anomaly and reset to the good old days. The risk, of course, is that the new powers invested in the mayor’s office could fall to a Democrat in the not-distant future; and even a gerrymandered district-only council soon could regain its Democratic majority.

Young says he’d live with that; he’s about good government. I would submit that a few bonus years of holding on to the most coveted territory in the state would be any garden variety politician’s definition of good government. Besides, the Republicans most likely will still hold the legislature and governor’s office; what’s to stop them from changing it all back?

We could let the local people decide. Democrats have asked for a referendum on the Ballard-bolstering bill. Republicans like some referendums, but this one isn’t flying. Maybe they’re worried that the other side might finally get that turnout job right.